Berlin’s Gulasch: A Stirring of Home

Luisa Weiss’s recipe (and pairing) for a heartwarming bowl of gulasch and GemĂĽtlichkeit in Germany’s capital city.
Luisa Weiss’s recipe (and pairing) for a heartwarming bowl of gulasch and GemĂĽtlichkeit in Germany’s capital city.
Food author
Luisa Weiss is an American and Italian food writer. She is the author of the cookbooks Classic German Cooking and Classic German Baking and the food memoir My Berlin Kitchen. She was the food columnist for Harper's Bazaar Germany for four years and is the founder of the Wednesday Chef food blog. She writes a newsletter called Letters from Berlin on Substack. She lives with her husband and two sons in Berlin.
Over the last decade, Berlin has established itself as a wine city. No small feat, since little quality wine is made within a five-hour driving radius. But in the early 2010s the natural wine movement brought in “small plates and natural wine” bistros and more and more distributors — independent wine stores who both import and buy wines and then sell them to both restaurants and consumers alike — are basing themselves here. The RAW wine fair made Berlin its Central European hub back in 2015. Before March 2020, business was good. Then came Covid. Putting the Neighbor back in Neighborhood at…...
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Germany seems to require an official examination for everything. Qualitätsweine (“quality wines”) are no exception. Those that fail the test are slapped with the Landwein label. In April 2015, a group of top growers from Baden, deep in Germany’s southwest, joined forces to rebel against the official inspection system. Flouting what officials would think of as a demotion, they decided to wear Landwein as a badge of honor. Baden has long been seen as the kinder, more conventional Germany. Thus Landwein is a direct challenge to that sensibility, one that takes on more significance because it seemed the unlikeliest of places for revolt. It happened the way so many…...
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Mason Washington wants to set himself apart in the wine world. He’s convinced his German identity is the ticket. The 24-year-old digital media marketer grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a small city in the American south that Washington charitably describes as being “what you make of it.” It was an unlikely place for a young Black man to be raised in a German family. But his grandmother Ingrid, a native of Berlin, and his mother, Carmen, born in Munich, were just that. “The biggest thing for me is the German heritage on my mom’s side,” says Washington. Now, he’s digging into…...
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